The BBC quizzed chip maker TSMC on the possibility of increased prices and you're really not going to like the answer

The ever-spiralling cost of computing components is not exactly news. But the big question is how much longer this will all continue. Unfortunately, a new interview by the BBC with TSMC, the company that manufactures so many of the chips that go into our PCs, suggests there's plenty more to come.

TSMC's Chief Financial Officer, Wendell Huang, was asked: "Are you likely to increase your prices for customers?" His answer was, well, it went like this:

"We don't increase the price suddenly, four fold, five fold," he said. Er, OK, how about two fold or three fold? The BBC didn't ask that, but Huang did continue when pressed again on the matter of TSMC increasing its prices.

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"We reflect our value," Huang said, before going on to explain that TSMC's "value" includes geographic diversification, or having fabs at multiple locations across the world, technology leadership, in other words, offering the best chip production nodes, and manufacturing access, which means the ability to crank out lots of chips.

For what it's worth, Huang also said that inflation had driven TSMC's costs up, though by an unspecified amount. Net result in the context of possible price increases from TSMC? "We want to reflect our value," Huang repeated. It's hard to interpret all this as anything other than a signal, put as gently as possible, that TSMC is planning price increases.

I think we can all agree that GPU prices are already quite high enough, thank you very much. (Image credit: Future)

It arguably says a lot that TSMC is calling out sudden four to five-fold price increases as something it does not do, while leaving plenty of space for what could still be dramatic price rises. The implied context here is memory chip costs, which have gone up by around that kind of level and pretty suddenly, to boot.

So, if you really wanted to put a positive spin on things, you could say that TSMC is signalling that price increases for the chips it manufactures for customers, including Nvidia, AMD and Intel, won't escalate as catastrophically as memory and storage.

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The problem is that CPUs and GPUs are more expensive to start with and represent a larger chunk of the cost of a PC. Back when memory prices were "normal", the cost of RAM was, what, at most 10% of the cost of a really nice gaming rig?

Meanwhile, CPU and GPU combined might be 60% or 70% of the overall cost. So, a doubling of the cost of those components would have more impact on PC prices than the quadrupling of memory prices has. You get the idea.

In short, we could really do without TSMC extracting its "value" from us. TSMC made $54 billion in profit in 2025. So, it doesn't seem terribly obvious that its prices need to go up even further. But then companies exist to make money. And such is the demand for its services right now, TSMC can probably get away with turning the screw even tighter. Pity.

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